Two years ago, Ronald Coles Investment Gallery, an Australian art seller that claimed an annual turnover of $20 million, shut up shop. Coles himself was declared bankrupt and disappeared. Now, after a massive police investigation, he's finally been arrested and charged with 87 offences relating to his investment art fraud scheme. Experts have been persuaded to opine that the affair is “Australia's largest-ever art scandal" and "threatens to destroy trust in the local industry for years.”
Coles — once a Bentley driver, with the licence plate "BUYART" — has been lying very low, and with good reason. Clients who'd trusted his matey style of doing business were outraged to discover that the art they thought they owned was either a forgery or was co-owned with four or five other people.
At least 43 clients have come forward over the last two years. One who'd invested $1 million in four paintings by famed, dead Australian artists Norman Lindsay, Arthur Streeton, and Eugene von Guerard told the Sydney Sun Herald newspaper: "One of the items, by Lindsay, has since appeared on the internet after being sold by another dealer. It means Ron sold it to someone else — and never told me."
Coles also showed contemporary art by landscape painter Ken Knight. Knight — who sold works for around $3,500 — was amazed to discover that amongst the 400-plus paintings found in the gallery during the police raid in 2009 were works by him with Arthur Streeton's signature on them. With a little aging varnish on top, they were now priced at half a million dollars.
And David Boyd, prominent member of the Boyd artistic dynasty, found fakes in his name too, telling a TV investigation in 2009: “I mean, he's a dishonest wretch and a cheat, that's all. What do you say to a cheat if you're invited to say anything? I don't think I'd say anything to him at all. I think I would probably walk past with my nose in the air.” Sadly it's just too late for him to experience that pleasure. Boyd died a couple of weeks before Cole was arrested.